The unbloggable

I, even I, May, the Greatly Articulate, do not have the words to be fair, to be reasonable, and to be accurate about it all.

Disclaimer! There has been no adultery, violence, addiction, crime, financial misdemeanor, lies about Really Important Stuff, or any other Irrevocable Deal Breaker. You may continue serenely in your opinion that May and/or H is and/or are sweetness and rectitude personified who chiefly need a cuddle.

We just fundamentally came adrift on the matter of infertility, miscarriage, treatment, progress, lack of progress, what to do next, etc.

Since the chemical ‘pregnancy’ of Valentines’ Day 2011, I have been considerably more gung-ho about pursuing treatment than H. H has dealt with it all by simply pretending none of it existed, not infertility, not adenomyosis, not PCOS, not endometriosis, and absolutely not the nasty little biological fact that his wife was getting older.

And older.

I will be 38 in less than a month.

I have dealt with it by wasting appalling amounts of time and energy in trying to get H and I onto the same page about treatment-or-not. OK, same chapter. Same book? Same section of the library?

I had – still have, frankly – a neurotic ungovernable horror of the idea of trying to have a child without my spouse’s full cooperation and consent. I know many partners have been reluctant and uninterested right up until the child arrives, and then become doting parents of the bestest sort. This is not how it works in my family, though. In my family, a partner is reluctant and uninterested until the baby is an undeniable and looming reality, and then said partner will cycle through furious, trapped, raging, hateful, abandoning, depressed, shitty uninvolved parent of epic sexism, and divorced. So. As far as I was concerned, for my increasingly brittle sense of mental equilibrium and inner strength/peace/not-flaking-outness, I needed H to understand what was involved, what was at stake, and to be prepared to ring clinics, make appointments, nag mildly dense and disorganised secretaries etc. while I got on with the Epic Physical Suffering and Angst (this deal still seems absolutely fair enough to me. If H would like to take custody of the uterus while I make the phone-calls, I would be delighted). And H did not get it. At all. Especially not the bit about May getting older and iller and LESS ALMIGHTY FUCKING FERTILE with each passing month.

That, Gentle Readers, was very difficult for me to deal with – his utter indifference to the fact his stalling was directly prolonging my suffering and reducing our chances. Not that he was stalling per se, mind you. If he’d asked for a time out so he could have a good old stall I could’ve gone on the pill or what have you and Not Suffered Epically while he carefully eased his head out of his bum. I wouldn’t’ve been pleased, but I would’ve understood. And we could’ve negotiated time limits and rules – six months No Talking About It and then we talk about it again, nine months then final decision, sort of thing.

This refusal to talk about talking about it (very meta) also meant that he was never saying he wouldn’t pursue treatment/consider quitting/have sex with me this month. So I would wait for an answer, or hope for a timely shag, or whatever, and it wouldn’t happen, and I’d be angry, and H would explain he had a headache/tummy-ache/bad day/bad leg/bridge was blown up by squirrels, and this only applied to THIS month and NEXT month would be different, and I would shout ‘oh for FUCK’S SAKE, that’s what you said LAST MONTH,’ and H would look bewildered and say, ‘no, last month it was raining/business trip/man-flu/attack of the were-rabbit,’ and I would say ‘DON’T YOU SEE THE PATTERN HERE?’ and H would look even more bewildered and say ‘errr… no?’ and I would throw a cup at him.

No, I’m not saying I dealt with it particularly well either. Constant physical pain will do that even to someone as God-like in her understanding and general loveliness as me.

And then the possible chemical pregnancy this February. On the anniversary of the last one.

I… I shall draw a veil, I think. I don’t want to revisit the past few months in detail. It was all very very angry, and very unhappy, and I still feel betrayed by H, and not as forgiving as I would like to feel.

I believe it only just these past few weeks that it actually dawned on H for the first time ever that the adeno/endo/PCOS/age thing was not actually in stasis at all, and he may have disastrously fucked things up by spending so long on that peaceful river cruise in Egypt.

(I know that when he turned to me the other night and asked, in tones of dawning wonder, if I’d ever considered the fact that my stiff and distorted uterus might actually be a problem, I very nearly jammed my wedding ring up his fundament and walked out on him. Because I have ‘only’ been worrying myself sick about the same fact since I was first diagnosed three or four years ago, which is why I asked every single medical professional we ever did see about it, and why my conversation since has been littered with such terms as miscarriage, bleeding during pregnancy, restricted intra-uterine growth, premature labour, obstructed labour, placenta accreta and post-partum haemorrhage).

Anyway. You can judge either or both of us if you like, but I’d rather not hear it.

I mean it. I will go on a comment-deleting spree if you make me cry and feel ashamed.

The net result of all this Weltschmerz is that I am thoroughly under the weather. 2013 has been The Year Of The Unwellness. I began February with norovirus. Then I had the possible chemical pregnancy that shattered me. Then I had the flu – proper, six days of fever, laryngitis, cough that lingered for weeks, oh-God-I-feel-awful flu. Then I got my period again and that was again shockingly and lingeringly painful. And then, right in the middle of that cycle, out of nowhere, I got thrush. I spent a week with my favourite lady-parts a fiery itchy hell-circle of No Sleep For YOU! (Canesten sorted it out. Canesten and I are kissing in a tree). Then I got my period again last Tuesday and I was horribly sick. I haven’t vomited that much that hard for nearly two years. My entire intestinal tract, from mouth to… well… anyway, none of it is speaking to me, and Cute Ute the Destroyer is still rampaging about bleeding everywhere and generally acting like a baited wolverine chained to a stake. And I’ve had two migraines already. And violent cramp in my leg, almost certainly due to dehydration, so now I can’t walk normally. And hayfever, now that bloody Spring is bloody here at bloody last and all the bloody trees are bloody flowering.

I like this one! Or, if in a less-urban area: A family friend used to buy a dozen eggs, go out in the woods, and throw them all very hard at trees. Sometimes it took two dozen. Yes, I know it’s sinful to waste food, but it’s WAY cheaper than a divorce.

QoB is very wise. Take heed.
And you, dear, need the biggest cuddle. Perhaps H could use this time when you get cuddled to think about EVERYTHING. It seems that although he has all the necessary parts to think for himself, he does not do it all the time, which is excusable, we don’t need to do it all the time, but then when he does it, it is sequentially, and is literally not seeing the forest for the trees. Although one I assume sees not so many trees while cruising down that river in Egypt. Now that he is home, he can get aquainted with this picture, while it is still green. I am not really judging him, and I hate stereotyping, but men can behave like this and call women irrational (on what fucking base?!) and you can’t help them see the truth until they realise it for themselves, because this is how it is. Anyway. Welcome back to the library, H. Take a seat next to May, on THAT page, the one with nappies and baby rocking in the night, under unicorn farts and rainbows. You look lovely there, you two.
The road to your baby is a very nasty one, May. One thing I hope is true for you, that when you hold your baby in your arms, you will have not forgotten anything from what you have been through to get there, but you will have no time and cannot remember. It sounds stupid, but you know what I mean.
Now, put that kettle on. One needs a cuppa in times like these.

Oh, GOD, May. This sounds so blasted familiar; you are not alone. Hugs, and… what else can I give you? Chocolate Lichen? Alcohol? Punch bag? I will settle on widely diffused sympathy for Household May. This is all so shit, and I do so wish it wasn’t.

My sympathies for the beleaguered cute ute and the rest of chez May household. Maybe you all need a massage, soft music, and candles. I confess I did the massage and soft music thing while TTC (can’t remember if there were candles, as my eyes were closed). And, I can’t say with certainty that it helped me get pregnant, but it did feel REALLY good. This can easily be a DIY project, although a knowledgeable massage therapist might be a well-deserved indulgence for you.

Just my sympathy. My partner also doesn’t seem to get that there are consequences to “not rushing” and after 4 continuous months of bleeding I might have just finally had it at him when he asked if the doctors had any idea what would make me feel better (yes! of course! and it certainly precludes any possibility of my dreams coming true but minor detail). Hoping the road from here can only improve.

May, I am sorry this has been so hard. I am still here listening and wishing with all my heart that something shifts for you. I have had a little bit more wine than I should tonight so I will speak frankly, but with no intent to be negative–only to talk about my hopes for you…

Motherhood–if you can arrive at a baby, you can do it single, you can do it in a pair. We have a family friend whose husband delayed on children too long and, once they divorced, became a very happy single mother. But of course I want you guys to work past this. I imagine infertility/recurrent miscarriage are like many other health-related stressors upon a marriage… very challenging. I guess, in the end, I want to say, if you want a child, I hope you will take every opportunity to get there, even if that means thinking about doing it on your own, adoption, or surrogacy, or some combination of those. (I remember your saying the latter two require the renunciation of the first, not to mention they have their own extreme complications–it’s just that I think it means that much to you.) But I also hope and believe H will be able to travel that path with you. I do hope he gets whatever help he needs to confront the issues that you have had no choice but to face head-on. I get the sense you have worked very hard to set your own pain or fears aside in the pursuit of a child and it sounds very hard to have your partner not entirely on the same page. I think H can get there, but he needs to realize that you are not setting the timeline; physiology is. Meanwhile, you’re paying your dues not only in emotional agony but in literal, physical blood and tears. You need him to see and understand all that you’re giving.

I don’t know what you’ll do or what you should do, I simply hope for you that you will not have any regrets looking back about the treatments or solutions you explored or about the time it took to explore them (taking into account what you knew at the time). Lots of love to you, and H, as you work through these very difficult times.

Were I you, there would be a great deal of stomping and door slamming, so I commend you if no one’s fingers have gotten smashed in the frustration. I wish that I had anything to say other than how dreadfully sorry I am that this is happening to you and my fervent desire that all of this will be over soon and you will be on to days full of rainbows and unicorn farts.

Ah. So, I will share something unfortunate about my own infertility journey. At some point, hubby began experiencing erectile dysfunction. Out of the blue, every time my OPK turned positive. Month after month with no sex when I was ovulating. We tried having me conceal when I was fertile so he wouldn’t know it was “game time.” No dice. Then it began to invade all the rest of the month. Sex was exceedingly rare and unpredictable. We got to the point where he was, um, helping himself in another room and kind of jumping into the bedroom to, uh, finish.

Ultimately, I’m not sure how much of my IUI journey was medically necessary because of my PCOS and how much all of our bedroom issues. How many invasive and awkward and expensive procedures I went through because he could not get his head right about getting pregnant. This despite him always insisting that he wanted a child.

I cannot find words to fully express the frustration of months going by with no sex during my fertile days. Hubby refusing to go to counseling, or to see a doctor about ED. I wanted to kill him. I was fully ready to do IUI with someone else’s sperm.

I’ll be 100% honest with you, I reached a point where I wanted a baby more than I wanted to be married to DH. And if we had not stumbled into pregnancy somehow with our 5th IUI, I was seriously considering donor sperm. We had a few attempted-IUI cycles where hubby could not make his contribution after I’d gone through all the meds and doc visits.

And the sad thing is, now I have a wonderful son whom I adore. Hubs adores our son, too. And sex has never been right with my husband again. We went for 15 months without sex one time, and we’re in what our counselor officially calls a sexless marriage. Hubs can’t explain what the problem is, but he’s unwilling/unable, whatever the problem is. Before trying to conceive, we had a normal, healthy sex life. Trying and struggling against infertility has permanently changed it.

We may be divorcing. I’m not willing to be celibate for the rest of my life. And I’d still have my son again. I’d gladly take my son over my marriage any day.

At some point, when your husband becomes more of an obstacle than your body, you have to realize that maybe you can’t have everything, maybe you have to choose what is most important to you, having a baby or your marriage. It seems extreme, but your husband’s failure to cooperate with something you want this much — whether it’s willful or because of something going on in his head — well, maybe you want and need different things from life.

Oh May, you’re not alone. You’re really not alone. The number of times I have wanted to slap my husband around the face with a wet fish, and instead collapsed into floods of miserable tears, I can’t tell you.

So sorry to hear this. You are a strong couple who have been through so much together and virtually grown up together. This is, I am sure, a blip. You’ll be on the same page soon, there is too much at stake not to be.

I’m so sorry that you are going through this. My husband is this way also, not just about the whole children and infertility issue, but with every issue of major importance: purchasing a house was a nightmare, and right now he is going through dilemmas at work. His first reaction to everything seems to be to close up and procrastinate and shut down emotionally. He cost us a house that I dearly wanted because he didn’t tell me about an error in his credit, and then didn’t fix it in a timely fashion. Fear and/or shame and embarrassment make him particularly blocked. The credit issue wasn’t his fault, but he still locked up like he had done something wrong. The second time I found a house I just forged ahead and dragged him along. I had no choice, because our house was going to close and we were going to be homeless. I wanted to kill him, our real estate agent wanted to kill him, and the buyers wanted to kill him because they were afraid of their purchase falling through. It was such a stressful situation that I have blocked most of it out. Now he LOVES this house and he is so proud of it and tells everyone who cares to hear about how I did all the work. That’s just great, but he is lucky to be alive. He loves our children and is a great father, but going through infertility was like trying to feed an oyster into a parking meter. I’m only telling you all this because just because H is having trouble attacking his demons, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t want children or that he won’t be a good parent, he just can’t move forward. Like a horse in a fire, sometimes you have to throw a blanket over their eyes and lead them forward. It is terribly unfair to you and emotionally gutting, but it works and sometimes has to be done.

I’m so sorry to hear about all that you’re going through…. I hope that H and you are back to the incredibly strong couple you usually are very soon.

One thing strikes me on reading the comments and that is the amount of women going through / having gone through the same issues with their partners. I count myself amongst them – my husband wanted to go straight for adoption rather than deal with (or even admit to anyone) his issues. There’s very much a theme here….

I feel your pain. well the emotional part at least. we did not try the medical route but adoption throught the public system, because being from an abused family myself i felt that I could actually relate to adopted kids we might get, as opposed to the situation i feel with my mom, that we have nothing in common, she had perfect upbringing and I had crap (no thanks to her)
Driver was so up and down and then not talking about it. and his ambivilance is all the agency could see, both agencies, and so we never got approved. and the emotional mess I was they said we should seek counselling. Pff. what ever.
i have since found out they get their funding by keeping open files, so they strung us along for years just so we would be an open case (read cash cow) for them.

finally after years of this , most of our marriage, i accepted the unacceptable. I read your blog half hoping you will get the golden prize, and yet the other half of me waiting for the inevitable acceptance to the nether side. the side most sites about infertility and adoption speak about. there are some good ones i have finally found that help the heal when you are ready. Sometimes i think i have accepted it now in hopes that a magical pregnancy happen when i get really happy with not having kids.
Sending you hugs, from rainy sw ontario.
If I could i’d bring a case of good wine, a couple good chick flics and stand at your door with open arms. and just tell you “Life Sucks” and we could cry and laugh and just drink, in hopes that tomorow would feel better. or at least different would be fine.

also.. i never hope for a happy life now. I am content with not being depressed. i was happy and excited too many times during the course of trying to adopt. and it always brought crushing blows after.

I hope i didnt make you cry. I really do wish you the best. and wish someone would take H aside and make him see the light. really. maybe there is a Ted talk or some white board presentation that might make men realize how much this means so to some of us women.

My mother had me and my sister young-ish and, later, went on to marry my step-father, who had not been married before and had no children of his own. But he really wanted them and was keen to start trying. My mother did not care for any more children; she’d reached 40 and had us, two girls that she loved. Still, she wanted him to have his own child, as well as us, and was more than happy to start trying to conceive at the age of 40 – FOR HIM.

And since she was 40, the doctor’s visits and the hormone cycles and the timed sex all begun. Some months, when the time came and timing was crucial, he, too, would not be up for ‘it’ . He drove my mother crazy. It was for him! She told him (I imagine she hissed) she would stop unless he took it seriously. In the end, she only got pregnant once and unfortunately miscarried. They still persevered but, sadly, it never happened for them.

Without going into much more detail, just take my word, I just know my step-father would have been a happier man if he had had a son or a daughter. I do not doubt for a second that he really wanted a baby and I know that he was devasted, really devasted, when their miscarriage happened. And yet and yet. When he had to do his ‘bit’, he would not always come across as entirely committed to making it happen.

So there you have it. It happens. And for this reason I send equally heart-felt hugs to both you and H.

As ever, wishing you both a change in fortunes. I’m really sorry things are shit right now. All the very best.

Hugs.
I used to joke that I could tell when I was ovulating because that is when my husbands tummy would explode/his work became incredibly stressfull/he only wanted to sleep/he couldn’t get it up. Seriously. Somehow he didn’t like those jokes (no surprise), and after many months of this I finally cracked, and he was more ambivalent than he admitted to. His son from the first marriage is autistic, and he was scared it would happen again. Would have been helpful if we had that conversation before we wnet to the specialist.

So far, we seem to only fall pregnant when I am not paying attention to the cycle (oh yes), so he has now been delegated with the monitoring of my temps- I take them, but he has to track them. we’ll see if that helps.

You need a universe of hugs, you poor things, what a cruel bind to be in. It’s so hard on a couple. UGH. I have, I admit, been in denial myself, when what was needed was swift and decisive action. It’s so hard, I say it again.

Its very funny how men are often overlooked in the babymaking process. We all seem to think that it is all about the woman. Men have emotions as well! The stress that the woman feels at not being able to produce a baby, it is felt by the man as well. Has no-one noticed that the “symptoms” the men have been presenting with are the same symptoms that people with depression get? When a woman gets depressed and her sex drive/libido goes down, the man is told to deal with it and have some sympathy for her. Infertility isn’t just a problem that women have, men suffer just as much as women and quite often their bodies will shut down on them, just as women’s do. There isn’t an easy answer with all of this. My heart aches for you May, that you are struggling and having such a horrendous time. But I also feel such pain for H, who has to watch you suffer and is also having his own hopes and dreams fade, at the expense of your health and wellbeing. I’m not attacking anyone here at all, I just know how hard it is for the male part of the relationship. I watched good friends go through it and I saw his world collapse month after month while everyone fussed over his wife and he sat to the side quietly sinking further and further into himself. Love each other, married each other for love, and all that comes with it xx

Which is why, for the past five or six years, I have been worried sick about H. Which is why I begged him to go to counselling. Twice. Which is why whenever family and friends asked me how I was doing, I made a point of talking about how H was too. Which is why I encouraged him to blog too, either here or on his own blog if he wanted one, so he could also have the love and support of the internets. Which is why I often mention, on this ‘ere blog, my concerns for H and his emotional state and how he is coping.

Which is why, you know, H is in counselling as we speak, has been for nearly a year.

Chez May, WE ARE PERFECTLY BLOODY AWARE OF HOW HARD IT IS FOR THE MALE PART OF THE RELATIONSHIP. We only wish H himself were perfectly bloody aware of it, because the denial thing is the most self-destructive and simultaneously passive-aggressive thing I have seen short of alcoholism, and I am fed up of being the target of H’s resentment over the situation.

And actually I get absolutely no sympathy at all from anyone, least of all H, when my libido goes ‘en vacance’. Most of the time I am being told my DESIRE to have lots and lots of lovely sex is unfeminine, downright unnatural even (I hasten to add, H himself however has never said anything of the sort, ever, as the one thing he ISN’T, is a Gender Stereotyper). Now that my libido has finally given up and died from grief and neglect, I have received exactly NO sympathy from anyone at all about it, not even from H. Especially not from H, who seems chiefly relieved. The horseshit in magazine advice columns about ‘typical’ male and female libido does not map onto my life at all, in the slightest, and is hereby declared irrelevant to this blog and all who sail in it.

I wasn’t attacking you at all, I can understand how frustrating it is and how much you are both suffering. I know that he is in counselling, I have been reading your blog for years now, and I know how difficult it has been for both of you with his shutting down when things get tough. I was just saying that men are wired differently, and quite often take a lot longer to respond to counselling than what women do. Maybe because it is seen as a sign of “weakness” to need it, or the feeling that men don’t do counselling. The other problem could be that he just doesn’t WANT to deal with it. And that leaves you both stuck in a rut of ongoing unhappiness. I wasn’t referring to you personally about the lack of libido, it was a general comment about how when women have been trying for months/years, that sex becomes a chore rather than enjoyable for the both of you, and people tend to focus more on the woman as she is going through the injections, hormones and general fuckery that goes with IVF and assisted pregnancies. I really wasn’t attacking anyone on here, let alone you May, I was just making a general observation as I spent a lot of time with a male friend who was going through IVF with his wife. I was friends with him before her and saw a lot more of him during the process. I just remember his total feeling of helplessness and his subsequent depression. The desperation to have a baby can make what should be a happy time into a soul destroying relationship wrecker. It’s awful to watch/read about let alone live through. I honestly wish you nothing but the best and every time I read on here I hope and hope that it is good news, I’m sorry for any offence that was taken. I really wasn’t meaning to offend or make out that you or anyone is trivialising what H or yourself is going through.

I don’t think anyone is saying infertility is not depressing for men, nor that they aren’t entitled to want time off etc, just that we wish they’d blooming well talk about it instead of making excuses, consciously or not.

As a woman whose automatic reaction to most things stressful is to stick my hands over my ears and go la, la, la and/or stall about making a decision I can for H in a way. But then again I feel for you too. And indeed both of you. It just sucks enormously in all possible ways.

Sheesh almightly. It is like you really really offended some very powerful gds in a previous life, as did H, and everytime you think they are done, they are like, nope, here’s some more. And after curling up in the corner for a while, you magnificent woman, you get up and just keep on keeping on. It’s astonishing.

Suffice it to say that I empathise with the tensions that are going on for you, and that L articulated above. Nuff said for me, but it’s really fucking hard, and there’s nothing easy or helpful to say. The one thing I cannot bring myself not to say is:

You cannot keep waiting for him to get his act together, or he will have taken your chances away.

Whatever the solution is, it does not involve any more faffing around on his part.

I have been repeatedly marking this post as unread hoping that I would find time to bang out a worthy comment of support for you, and now that I’m here with a moment I really just want to tell you that I’m sorry, and that I think your feelings are totally valid. Four miscarriages over nearly six years didn’t seem to affect us too terribly marriage/relationship-wise, and then I finally stayed pregnant for once and came out of my anxiety/depression fog and realized that we’d both been in denial. I dragged myself out of it maybe halfway through my pregnancy, but it somehow took my husband until maybe last weekend or so (baby is almost eleven months old), and it has sucked a lot of the joy right out of new-motherhood that I expected and felt I sure as fuck deserved after all the shit we went through to get here (apologies, of a sort, because I know that it seems to some (most? all?) that I should just be happy to have a baby regardless, and have harbored no other expectations about how my partner would think/feel/act about it, but….that ain’t real, and we keep it real at May’s house, right?). We still love each other but we basically have to start all over and learn to like each other again, and how to have a life together, one that now (finally, thank FSM) includes a baby, which….well, it’s shitty that we ever even let it get so bad. I know from H’s writings here that he is not foolish, but this is not at all to diminish the heartache he’s putting you through. I relate a thousand times over to those feelings of betrayal. I am only now starting to let go of my mountains of anger and resentment (needed a genuine apology first, because fuck you if you think I’m just going to be nice as you run away with fingers in your ears screaming la la la at any mention of a negative emotion and then come back and want to discuss the weather or our next meal as if I’ve forgotten the feeling ever existed). I admit to being a nasty, mean wife as this was all going on, but what can one expect from someone they’ve basically emotionally abandoned? Cheer and unicorn queefs? Gah. You deserve many, many drinks, followed by a hangover-free lie-in and a confession of revelation from H, accompanied by renewed promise to pay the fuck attention to what is going on with you and what it MEANS to you, as well, along with a heartfelt apology for (intentionally or not) prolonging all of it with his cluelessness (not meant as a slight to H, honestly, just that in my experience, one won’t feel as forgiving as they want to if the person they want to forgive does not seem contrite!). Needless to say, you more than deserve all of this to be followed by a healthy pregnancy and happy start to parenthood, with H at your side, marveling that you have made it, together. I wish this for you SO HARD, May!